Consumers and marketers don't always see eye to eye when it comes to customer loyalty programs. Consumers tell us they enroll in programs for the points, discounts, and savings, while companies tell us boosting customer engagement is a top goal for their loyalty programs. Sixty-seven percent of consumers consider themselves active in programs they join, yet the marketers who run loyalty programs report that only 16% of customers are active program participants. Regardless of which camp you fall into, one thing is clear: a program is only as strong as the members who participate in it. And, the value exchange a program creates is central to attracting members today and getting them to come back tomorrow, next month, and next year.

But, choosing program benefits can create some anxiety. Marketers need a mix of rewards that satisfies consumers' desire for savings while encouraging deeper engagement, and acknowledging/recognizing customer value. Forrester clients often ask me questions like "What can we offer besides points?," and "How do we make customers feel valued?." The short answer is that there are a lot of options that have varying objectives for the customer:

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Globally, consumers will own more than six billion mobile phones by the end of 2014, and about two billion of them will be smartphones. With this penetration comes the mobile mind shift - the expectation to be able to access any information or service on the mobile device, in the moment of need.

What’s more, consumers reach for their mobile phones 100 to 200 times a day. In these mobile moments, they expect companies to understand their context and offer relevancy as well as both curated and streamlined experiences on mobile devices. They want to see if their children are home from school, buy coffee, access coupons, check in for a flight, check stock prices, use Skype to call Singapore, and play Candy Crush. Enterprises must learn how to, and then serve, customers in these mobile moments. Otherwise, they will lose – an entrepreneur like Uber’s Travis Kalanick will disrupt their business just like he did with taxis.

Mobile moments extend all of the way through the customer’s journey.

But while mobile has definitively become the most important digital platform for most companies to engage with their customers, too few enterprises have embraced this opportunity. Too many view the mobile phone as simply a smaller screen or another channel.

Only a few businesses, like Starbucks, have been able to curate and own mobile moments with their customers. More than 10 million customers engage with the coffee chain each week through its mobile payment app. Starbucks owns what we call Loyalty Mobile Moments. For them and others like Citibank, USAA, and United Airlines, they must strive to excel in those moments of truth.

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In her recent report, my colleague Reineke Reitsma revealed that European consumers interact with a diverse suite of social networking sites, with Facebook and YouTube leading in terms of consumer engagement. Pinterest, however, is an outlier: European consumers demonstrate minimal interaction with Pinterest compared with both other social media sites and their US peers. According to Forrester’s Consumer Technographics® data, 18% of US online adults regularly visit the website but only 2% of European online adults across the UK, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain visit Pinterest once a month or more:

Sure, Steve was responsible for the development of new trading tools and technology enhancements for the thinkorswim trading platform. And he does an incredible job of connecting customer experience improvements to technology innovation (as you’ll see if you read on).

No, we recruited Steve because TD Ameritrade shot up seven points in our Customer Experience Index this year, edging ahead of last year’s leader in the investment category, the formidable Vanguard. How it did that and why it did that is a story we want customer experience aficionados to hear.

In the run-up to the event, Steve answered a series of our questions about some of things he’ll talk about. His answers appear below.

I hope you enjoy his insights, and I look forward to seeing many of you in New York on June 24th and 25th!

Q: When did your company first begin focusing on customer experience? Why?

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The rumors turn out to be true. Apple is buying Beats for $3 billion, just slightly less money than originally suggested. Now that it's official, I'm confidently reiterating my conviction that Apple cannot be spending this unprecedented sum on Beats for either its headphones or its subscription music business. Because while the company may be worth that much, it's not worth that much to Apple, the world's most innovative consumer electronics and consumer software maker. Because choosing to buy Beats purely for its existing businesses and revenues would represent Apple significantly lowering its sights, aiming to graduate right from innovative leader of life-changing technology to kinda-cool company that makes stuff teenagers like. Not that selling to teenagers isn't a good thing; it can certainly bring in money, but it doesn't typically generate long-lasting brand relationships.

To be clear, if Apple is buying Beats purely for its headphones or music subscription business, then Apple is making a mistake. However, there are those of us who still believe that Apple hasn't thrown in the towel. And why would it? There are still many consumer markets to dominate — entire markets like wearables and home automation tech and even in-car experiences, all of which are in their infancy — and Apple still has the smarts, the brand, and certainly the money to make a run for any of those things, if not all of them. So why would Apple instead sign up to become a holding company for fashionable but not life-changing brands?

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What are the four words everyone involved in mobile strategy should fear?

"Let's build an app!"

The reason you should fear these words is that they will lead to pain. Your CEO, or your CMO, or somebody else in your company has noticed that mobile engagement exists. Great. Now they're ready to plunge right in and create something without thinking it through. And if you're involved in mobile development, this means a whole lot of pain in your future.

There is a right way to think about mobile. It's called the IDEA cycle, and it's the central idea in our new book The Mobile Mind Shift.

When you're wondering how to engage with your customers on mobile, follow these four steps, which you'll remember with the acronym IDEA:

Identify the mobile moments and context. Think through your customer's day and how they interact with you. What are the moments in which she might turn to mobile? Is she ready to check in for a flight? Wondering what to buy her daughter for Christmas? Realizing that her prescription needs to be refilled? For each of these moments, there is a context -- the customer's location, history, and state of mind. Taken together, these moments represent the set of possible times and places in which mobile can help.

Design the mobile engagement. Here's where you evaluate those mobile moments to determine which ones are most beneficial to the customer, and helpful to you as well. It's also where you think about the potential ways to interact, such as sending a push notification, displaying content, enabling sharing, or presenting a possible transaction.

When it comes to mobile banking, customers' expectations are growing faster than the hair on a Chia Pet. So every year, Forrester reviews and scores the mobile banking offerings from the largest retail banks in the US across seven categories: Range of touchpoints; Enrollment and login; Account information; Transactional functionality; Service features; Cross-channel guidance; and marketing and sales. You can read the complete report here or by clicking on the link below:

Here is a sampling of some of our findings:

Chase and U.S. Bank tie for the top spot. With scores of 69 out of 100, Chase and U.S. Bank received the highest overall scores among the five banks we evaluated. Chase delivers the basics superbly, with a wide range of transactional features for transfers, bill pay, and P2P payments as well as strong cross-channel guidance for customers to contact Chase and find ATMs and branches. By contrast U.S. Bank stands out for more advanced features, including marketing and research for additional products, the ability to take a picture of a paper bill to enroll in bill pay, and the ability to pay another person using the contact list in a mobile phone.

In Canada, mobile banking is growing up faster than Justin Bieber. So from March 21 to April 9, 2014, Forrester reviewed and scored the mobile banking offerings from the five largest retail banks in Canada across seven categories: Range of touchpoints; Enrollment and login; Account information; Transactional functionality; Service features; Cross-channel guidance; and marketing and sales. You can read the complete report here or by clicking on the link below:

Here is a sampling of some of our findings:

CIBC earns the highest overall score with BMO and Scotiabank on its heels. With an overall score of 71 out of 100, CIBC received the highest overall scores among the five retail banks we evaluated, continuing the firm’s leadership in mobile banking since it launched its first iPhone app four years ago. But the other large Canadian banks are hot on CIBC’s trail: BMO and Scotiabank each earned a score of 70 out of 100 with impressive – and recent – overhauls of their mobile offerings. Scotiabank lets users apply for new products via mobile with pre-filled, mobile-optimized applications. BMO, meanwhile, ensures that all mobile money movement task flows are clear and consistent -- incorporating the same progress meter at the top of every screen.

Big data this, big data that. Hardly a day goes by when we're not bombarded with messages about the big data platforms and technologies that will solve all our marketing problems. Let's be honest though: these tools and technologies alone simply won’t solve the big data challenge. But the effect of all that media and market hype? A lot of confusion and mistrust on the part of marketing leaders about what big data really is, what it can do, and how it should be incorporated into business strategy. And that's holding a lot of firms back from maximizing the power of the data at their disposal.

By now you're asking yourself how anything I've said so far is different or unique. Here it is: "big data" isn't about exabytes or petabytes. It's not about velocity. It's not a project or Hadoop or any other single thing. Big data is a journey that every company must take to close the gap between the data that's available to them, and the business insights they're deriving from that data. This is a definition that business and technology leaders alike can understand and use to better win, serve, and retain customers.

My colleague, Brian Hopkins, and I have just published a pair of reports -- researched and written in parallel -- to help our marketing and technology management clients work together to tackle the opportunities and challenges of big data. Here are a few of the most interesting "a-ha" moments of the research:

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If you have children or are involved with children, you know that just as soon as you’ve figured out how to engage with that cute little baby in the right way, everything changes. Before you turn around, that baby you knew is starting school, graduating from college, and moving on to a career of her own. And as the baby grows and changes, your approach to engage with her on her terms must change too. If you’ve ever tried to talk to a teenager in the same way that you speak to a 10 year old, you know exactly what I mean.

While we understand and instinctively know how to change our approach as children grow up, we don’t often think of our buyers growing up. But, in the post-digital age, they are growing up and changing frequently. And as marketers, you must adapt and change your approach along with them.

And that’s where my new report, “Rethink Marketing In The Customer’s Context” (subscription required) can help. Expanding on a report published on February 21, 2013, my new report provides a framework for business-to-business (B2B) marketers to recast their approach with the full customer lifecycle in mind.

Start now to update your approach and:

Put the customer at the center of marketing thinking. Today’s market realities demand that B2B CMOs replace internal sales-driven marketing funnels with a full customer-life-cycle approach that aligns with the ways customers now make purchase decisions and build relationships with their vendors.